Beginning Python - From Novice to Professional

264 CHAPTER 11 ■ FILES AND STUFF
More useful implementations could do such things as storing data in a data structure,
computing a sum, replacing patterns with the re module, or perhaps adding line numbers.
Also, to try out the examples, you should set the variable filename to the name of some
actual file.
Doing It Byte by Byte
One of the most basic (but probably least common) ways of iterating over file contents is to use
the read method in a while loop. For example, you might want to loop over every character
(byte) in the file. You could do that as shown in Listing 11-6.
Listing 11-6. Looping Over Characters with read
f = open(filename)
char = f.read(1)
while char:
process(char)
char = f.read(1)
This program works because when you have reached the end of the file, the read method
returns an empty string, but until then, the string always contains one character (and thus has
the Boolean value true). So as long as char is true, you know that you aren’t finished yet.
As you can see, I have repeated the assignment char = f.read(1), and code repetition is
generally considered a bad thing. (Laziness is a virtue, remember?) To avoid that, I can use the
while True/break technique you first encountered in Chapter 5. The resulting code is shown in
Listing 11-7.
Listing 11-7. Writing the Loop Differently
f = open(filename)
while True:
char = f.read(1)
if not char: break
process(char)
As mentioned in Chapter 5, you shouldn’t use the break statement too often (because it
tends to make the code more difficult to follow); even so, the approach shown in Listing 11-7 is
usually preferred to that in Listing 11-6, precisely because you avoid duplicated code.
One Line at a Time
When dealing with text files, you are often interested in iterating over the lines in the file, not
each individual character. You can do this easily in the same way as we did with characters,
using the readline method (described earlier, in the section “Reading and Writing Lines”), as
shown in Listing 11-8.